


Heavy

by veryconfidentsandwichshapedfreedom



Category: Divergent - All Media Types, Divergent Series - Veronica Roth
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, One Shot, References to Depression, Songfic, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-21
Updated: 2017-07-21
Packaged: 2018-12-04 20:15:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11562534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/veryconfidentsandwichshapedfreedom/pseuds/veryconfidentsandwichshapedfreedom
Summary: I'm holding onWhy is everything so heavy?Holding onTo so much more than I can carry





	Heavy

**Author's Note:**

> do you know how damn surreal it is to start writing a songfic about a character committing suicide only to have someone from the band kill themselves like two days later?
> 
> like
> 
> im scared to post this because it might be haunted? i mean it's definitely haunted because i managed to write a (sorta?) drew-centric story without making him explicitly gay for peter but seriously this turned from standard fanfiction to something in extremely bad taste really quickly. i'd dedicate this to chester bennington but as a linkin park fan i honestly think he was too good for this angsty trash
> 
> review if you liked/disliked pl0x but idrc if u do cause i know it can be time-consuming to leave comments on every story you have emotions about

Today is March 21st.

To the world, it's just a normal day. This morning, the sun will erupt over the horizon, bathing the city in light. People will stir in their beds, dreading the looming, ominous nature of the sadistic monster of overwhelming boredom that is work, hit the snooze button sixteen times before finally piling out of bed at the realization that they had seven minutes to get to the train, or walk four blocks, or drive across the neighborhood. People will laugh and cry and fight and make up and be born and die, but these events will be forgotten within days, hours, minutes. It will not be the beginning or end, the rise or fall, but the drab middle and its encompassing silence.

In the grand scheme of things, in the entire timeline of the world, this day is irrelevant. In the timeline of the year, this day is irrelevant. Even in the timeline of the week, something will happen to distract from today, leaving it overlooked and overshadowed by a far more important event occurring on a far more important date.

But not for me, and not for my best friend, Drew. He's not really my best friend, but he's my only friend, at this point, and I suppose that makes him my favorite by default, since he has no competition.

Today would have been Peter's twentieth birthday.

Peter is the reason Drew and I know each other. We'd been mutual friends through Peter as children, and ended up cultivating a relationship simply by sharing Peter's proximity.

Peter is dead now. He's been dead for four months, almost. They said it was an accident, his parents, the police, but Drew and I knew it wasn't. Peter was not dumb enough to play with a loaded shotgun. He was not dumb enough to shoot himself through the temple for any reason other than that he intended to end his life.

We both wish it was the case that Peter hadn't suffered fighting himself to the point of begging for death. We both wish he'd just made a mistake and paid the ultimate price for it. That would provide us some comfort, maybe, knowing that it wasn't anyone's fault.

Drew took it harder than I did, to the point where he's still caught in the initial stages of grief, still withdrawing himself from society and mourning openly, through words, through actions, through the lack of them. He's always been quiet, but since Peter died, he ignores everyone but me. I've gone to his family's apartment numerous times in the past four months, and I think I have exchanged more words with the average cashier than he has with his own parents.

We talk, but it's never about anything but Peter. Peter seems to consume Drew more in death than he did in life, and considering that Drew had been the poster child for obsession throughout his youth, following Peter around, joining every club and team he did just to be at his side, and disregarding the chance of chastisement that followed skipping school to sneak into Peter's room and hang out when he was ill or playing hooky, that is sickeningly sobering. Drew has always had problems with his head, a lack of independence and self-deprecating thoughts that belittled him into complete submission to others, but Peter's suicide raped any sanity he had left. It wrecked him; he lost it, and never really found it again. What little personality he once had is absent, and instead of a shell, a husk, he is nothingness.

I think I should call Drew today. I would never admit it to anyone unless they threatened my life, but I need someone to talk to. Peter's gone. We should be out together, the three of us, wading knee-deep in shared ambition, smiling, laughing, celebrating, but we aren't, and that concept is haunting, a cloud of hollowness that forces a black cloak of agony onto my back and compulsively reoccurring memories into my mind, repressed so long that they have become intrusive to my existence.

My parents kicked me out the day after I turned eighteen, the second abandoning me and disregarding my existence lost any legal consequence, so now I live alone, in a cheap apartment paid for with a menial minimum-wage job. Usually, the quiet of the nighttime is one of the only perks of living here, under a leaky roof, above crime-ridden streets, and submerged in musty, stale air, but right now, at three in the morning, with Peter's death plaguing my mind, it is maddening. Where there is absence, I hear his voice, high and sharp in the emptiness of the room, calling to me. 

"Molly," he whispers. He whispers on, and on, in a language structured like my own but nonsensical by arrangement, and desperation creeps into his voice, and I shut him out and swear to myself over and over again that he is a jar of ashes in his mother's house, no longer a person, not conscious, not begging for acknowledgement, and that I am not guilty for ignoring him, because he is not there, that I am not submerged in the midst of his soul, and he is not reaching out for me from beyond the grave. 

It is difficult, more difficult than it's ever been leading up to this point. Even the soft mattress beneath me feels stiff and uncomfortable, as if I were lying out on the hard, solid floor with jagged bits of sand and grit digging into my exposed flesh, leaving circular dents in my skin. For a moment, I am positive that I was wrong, and that his spirit really does surround me, clogging my lungs and weighting down my chest until it is too heavy to breathe against, too much of a burden, like everything else.

Is this how Drew feels?

But the sheets, strewn around my sides, remain soft and smooth and comforting even among the bursts of unwarranted dread creeping through my brain, and I thank something, someone, though I'm not sure who or what, for their presence.

Even as early as it is, I'm sure Drew is awake. He sleeps in periods of too much or not enough, and with the memories of Peter inevitably swirling around in his mind, taunting him, mocking his agony, something tells me he's in one of the inadequate phases, where he stays up all night, too jittery with stress to consider shutting his eyes. I sigh, so low and deep that it reverberates through my windpipe and into the hollow part of my chest. It's refreshing, and it provides an unexpected burst of energy to my weary muscles, enough to convince me to grab my phone off of the nightstand.

I heave myself onto my side, and then forward, and clamp a hand down onto it, accurate only because the case is dark enough that it's visible even when surrounded by the night. It's smooth and cool in my palm, but I yank it onto the bed in a sudden jerking motion, as if it had scorched my hand, charring my fingers into black, crumpled stumps and causing bulbous red blisters to blossom across my flesh in an explosion of stinging, burning anguish.

This is too familiar. It was dark when the call came, and I had been awoken by it. I'd grabbed my phone, off the nightstand, off the same surface, the same corner. I'd felt the weight of it against my hand, and my eyes, trapped in the glare of the screen, had burnt from the dramatic increase in the brightness of my surroundings. I'd answered, and Drew was sobbing into the phone, whimpering nearly indecipherable words that were sandwiched between whimpers and sniffles and babbled over the torrents of tears dominating his breathing. He'd told me that he'd just found out about Peter, what had happened only an hour earlier, and that he wanted to kill himself, too.

Though it is just a faint echo skirting the borders of my memories, I can't shake the horror in his voice, the unbridled, unconcentrated hurt and the instability of his raspy breaths. Getting the phone out of contact with me is a relief. I want to move it from its perch on my bed a few inches in front of me, and burn it, and run the ashes over with a truck. How dare _anything_ remind me of that night. I did not give it the right to.

Drew. I need Drew, for my sake, for his, even if it means touching that vile reminder of the worst thing that ever happened to me. 

I have never punched in a number faster.

For the slowest seconds of my life, ones that hesitate, stumble until they've long overstayed their welcome, the phone rings, hollow and tired in my ears, an empty sound in an empty void of helplessness where I am destitute of all companionship, of all pleasant thoughts, of everything that could have generated even a tiny spark of warmth, doomed to death from the beginning, within my frigid thoughts.

Then there is a muffled beep as he picks up, and his weepy voice shakes through the air.

"Hello?"

It is one word, one stupid, stupid word, but it is enough, from him. I swallow. For once, I actually enjoy the smell of wet dog that wafts in with every breath I take in this foul apartment, because with my breaths now come a flood of relief engendered by his company.

"Hey," I say. "I couldn't sleep, because of Peter, and... I don't know. We need to talk." This is a confusing, foreign feeling to me, being unsure what to say, where to begin. I am typically confident in my words, with a response concocted and perfected even before the person speaking to me is finished with their sentence. But I am drawing a blank on everything but our communal misery, so I long for him to continue, to lead my vacant emotions from dulled, weighty despair to dying embers of happiness with no chance of recovery, because that is still better, and probably as far as we can ever climb with only each other as support. "About anything."

He wheezes into the call, a sickly gasp for air, perhaps over tears, perhaps out of shock. This call has some parallels. I am calling Drew, instead of him calling me, and Peter's death has already been established, instead of being a new development, but everything else is the same. It is an hour at which we should both be sleeping, and we are both pained by the cruelty of fate and the seemingly infinite ills of the world, where someone we love and trust with all we ever experienced, someone who's been there as far back as we can remember, is stolen from us without so much as a false apology given only to place a bandage over the ragged chunks of a degloved limb in an expression of unrepentant scorn.

"Molly, I've been thinking, and..." His sentence peters out into an awkward, faded pause, as if the mere consideration of whatever he was about to tell me was too painful to recall. "Do you think it was my fault?"

I wasn't prepared for that, not so soon. We have this conversation at least twice a week, but it doesn't dull the impact. It is a bombshell, an emotional climax, something best saved for later on despite its pertinent nature, its pure sobriety in a sea of irrational ideas spurred by grief.

Meek, introverted Drew cannot be silenced about Peter's fate. It is as if he were an old wardrobe, and someone swung open his doors, and the opinions he had always restricted to being trapped within him came spilling out into one massive overflowing pile, unable to be restrained behind a barricade any longer. I never knew how anxious he was until Peter died, because he never shared, never admitted to it, leaving the contents of his brain a mystery. It was hinted at by little more than distant suspicion born only to be able to truthfully claim that I had an interest in his life, however minor.

But what am I supposed to say to that? I always tell him that Peter had a reason for everything, and we trusted him because of that quality, an evasive answer utilized to avoid having to contemplate the possibility too deeply. For the most part, I agree with my statement, but I can't help but debate the idea Drew keeps pushing. What if Peter killed himself because of something one of us did? What if he had feelings for one of us he was too ashamed by the existence of to confess, or he wanted to be someone else but couldn't bear dumping us to transistion over to new friends for his new life? What if one of us angered him without even realizing it, and that was the final trigger in a string of concealed hardships?

If any of that happened, it's probably Drew who did it. I can't imagine doing anything heinous enough to motivate Peter to resort to such a drastic, permanent solution to his problems. However, I still doubt that possibility. We were good friends to him. We'd never hurt him, especially Drew, who idolized him, whose eyes used to morph into round, pale pools of undiluted admiration whenever Peter was mentioned, Drew, who adored Peter more than Peter himself did, Drew, the lightning that trailed Peter's thunder, always, without fail.

"Peter did what he did for a reason," I say. "I don't know what it was, but I don't think you had anything to do with it. We might've even convinced him to stay longer."

Drew sniffs, apparently satisfied by my answer, but I can't censor away the belief that I did nothing but discourage him further and send him spiraling deeper into his inescapable realm of sorrow, somehow. That was the most comforting thing I could think to say, but I've always been better at destroying people than I have been at repairing them; recreating a damaged person from scattered emotional rubble is much harder and more tedious than knocking down someone who has already been built.

"I just keep thinking I did it, okay? I feel like I killed him myself, like the gun's smoking right in my hand, and I'm the one responsible. I can't stop thinking about him."

He staggers over the final words, to the point where they are simply disjointed syllables, battling to stay together but being drawn between hands and tugged apart in one smooth, solid motion, until they become separate pieces to what should be a whole. 

"I can't either," I say.

I could say more. It feels like we've swapped personalities, and I have absorbed Drew's mild demeanor, while he took on a louder, more outspoken one. Is that a sign of crisis or a natural and spontaneous reaction to the impact of grief?

"No, you don't get it," he whimpers. "It sucks for you, but you don't see it. The world is empty without him! There's nothing left to live for!"

A gasping shriek shoots through my ear, so piercing that the call stutters into static for a moment, his phone unable to transmit such a sharp noise. I wince. It is not from annoyance, but a pang of sympathy jabbing me in the sternum. It's a rare feeling to strike me; I don't feel it often, so when I do, I know things are serious, and someone I'm fond of is suffering, true and deep, more than they've ever suffered before. It is not within me to care unless someone is at the absolute nadir of their torment.

If I were a good person, half as noble and wise as Peter was, I would know what to say to fix Drew, to mend every wound the aftermath of Peter's death inflicted on him. But I don't, and I stay quiet, like Drew always did, not out of respect, or the desire to listen, but only because my sympathy is not generating words. I need to speak, tell him he's strong enough to move on, but I don't know what to say to express that, beyond the obvious clichés that will only give the illusion that I'm toying with him for my personal amusement, that he means nothing to me, so I don't say anything.

"We should be spending today with him," Drew whines. His voice trembles, like he can't force out words over the bulge in his throat and the budding tears accompanying it. "But he's gone. Everything's empty! I failed him! I—I could have stopped him!"

A cry escapes him, tense, pained, seeming to die and persist at the same time, both murdered and sustained by its own dense, looming sorrow. 

There is silence, for one second, two, three, four. It is the most barren moment of my life, and I yearn to fill it, even if only with a name or a word or a moan, but when I try to speak, nothing emerges. It is as if someone reached down my throat and stole my voice, and all my attempts to use it result in nothing but cold, dead air.

Then, in the background of the call, something shuffles against a solid surface. I hear the characteristic grinding screech of chair legs over floor. And a suppressed thump, audible only because of the lack of competing sounds. 

The call clicks. He hung up on me.

My heart sinks in my chest, and now it bobs hopelessly in an ocean of anxiety.

I call him again, begging for it to be a mistake. I know what he's going to do. The collapse of our conversation into hollow descriptions of heartbreak came so much earlier on than normal that he had to have been held under the weight of them for hours, even days beforehand, the heaviness a burden too strong to take, a burden he wanted to drop at the first opportunity in hope that it would free him, and when he found that it didn't, it was too much to take.

No one answers.

I call three more times.

Nothing.

Or maybe he'd been planning this for longer than I'd thought, and I kept him trapped in his suffering a few minutes longer than he had planned to be. Maybe I interrupted him.

Desperation builds in the form of a lump in my throat, and clogs my breaths, and fills my mouth with the bland taste of defeat. I try again, knowing that it is futile, knowing that he's probably already gone to join Peter, a follower to the end, knowing that it is too late, and knowing that I must retire to the impending collision of the loss of another life that had been intertwined with mine.

When that fails, I put the phone back on the nightstand and collapse, lying exactly how I'd been before, with my arms spread across the cold, uncovered bed and my chest open to the ceiling. Tomorrow, I will get the call I wanted, but it will be from his parents, after they find him in the same position as Peter, lifeless through his own conscious volition, after they bring in the police, and they properly label it as what it is instead of lying to protect feelings, to paint an exaggerated veneer of happiness over what had been concealed self-hate, because this time, it will be unmistakable.

And there is nothing I can do but sob and mourn and then keep fighting. 

Sometimes, things just become too heavy. 

 _I'm holding on_  
_Why is everything so heavy?_  
_Holding on_  
_To so much more than I can carry_  
_I keep dragging around what's bringing me down_  
_If I just let go, I'd be set free_  
_Holding on_  
_Why is everything so heavy?_


End file.
